Although Google has been adding new imagery to Google Earth, they have not been updating historical imagery since June, so we cannot make a map of the latest imagery. We did, however, look at a few locations this month which have recent imagery, including the damage caused by the Erskine Fire in California and the trail of destruction left by the Jiangsu Tornado in China. We also discussed an image of Itu Aba Island in the South China Sea that Taiwan apparently wants censored.

Google added quite a lot of interesting 3D imagery this month, including two new countries, Malaysia and Tunisia. The imagery of Tunis has since been removed but that is probably only temporary. The imagery of Sfax, Tunisia remains and a second location, Ipoh, has been added in Malaysia. The city of Kumamoto of Japan was also updated with 3D imagery captured after the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake and we had a look at the signs of earthquake damage, most notably a lot of blue tarpaulins used to patch the roofs. Last month marked the 100th anniversary of the US National Parks Service and in honour of the occasion Google released 3D imagery of a number of US Parks. We created some Google Earth tours showing off the imagery. We also had a look at some volcanoes as featured in 3D imagery, including Mount Fuji in Japan, Mount Vesuvius in Italy and Mount Saint Helens in the USA.

DigitalGlobe’s latest satellite WorldView-4 was supposed to be launched this month. However, the launch was postponed till October. Terra Bella successfully launched several new SkySat satellites in a joint launch with Peruvian earth observation satellite PerúSAT-1.

Google recently released 3D imagery for Mount Fuji in Japan. However, we discovered that there are a number of squares of the imagery that appear only in low resolution. We have come across this problem before and interestingly another location with a similar problem is Mount Vesuvius in Italy.

Mount Fuji, Japan.

Mount Vesuvius, Italy.

A third volcano, Mount Saint Helens in Washington State, USA, also has 3D imagery, but does not have any problems with it:

Mount Saint Helens, Washington State, USA.

The problem with squares of blurred 3D is not restricted to volcanoes. We know of a number of other places around the world where the same issue occurs. For the ones we know about, download this KML file. If our readers know of any others, please let us know in the comments.

Thank you to GEB reader Samppa for letting us know about this one in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

A recent story in the news is about some ring-shaped geoglyphs in Peru. It took a while to find the correct location in Google Earth, as the given location ‘Quilcapampa, in the Sihuas Valley’ was not recognised by Google Earth.

Once we tracked down the location, we were able to find quite a number of rings. We have marked the ones we found and a few other possibly related structures and also one or two locations that may be unrelated.
To see them in Google Earth, download this KML file.

Below are the clearest circles that we found:

We also found the structures below. There are some circles and a dashed line. We believe they are modern structures.

In April this year, the city of Kumamoto, Japan, suffered a series of large earthquakes. Google managed to capture aerial imagery of the city essentially during the event, after the first major event but before the largest shock and then captured another set of imagery from after the event. We had a look at what damage could be seen in the imagery, including a large number of landslides, collapsed buildings and a derailed train. From the overhead imagery it wasn’t easy to see the extent of the damage to buildings, even though we knew, based on ground level imagery, that there was severe damage in some locations. Now Google has updated the 3D imagery for part of Kumamoto with imagery captured after the event, and the extent of the damage to buildings is much clearer, especially because the roofs have been patched with light blue tarpaulin that is highly visible.

The suburb of Mashiki was the worst hit, and many houses are damaged beyond repair.

A historical building known as Janes’ Residence was completely destroyed. The rubble has been covered in the light blue tarpaulins

The Janes’ Residence was the first western-style house built in Kumamoto dating from 1871. It used to be in the grounds of Kumamoto Castle, but has been moved a number of times. Read more about it here.

Kumamoto Castle was badly damaged by the earthquake.

We have also created a Google Earth tour of the area showing all the light blue roofs, which you can view in Google Earth with this KML file or see in the YouTube video below.